# Saturday, February 18, 2006
HowTo: Get Write Access to an ApplicationData folder in ASP.NET
Saturday, February 18, 2006 7:11:26 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00) ( Asp.Net )
In a web application i'm working on, i needed to get write access to a folder, and preferably not the temp folder because the data should be kept reasonably safe from being deleted accidentally.  If it was a windows-forms application this would be easy, i would just use Application.UserAppDataPath.  So i thought for asp.net, i could use Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData but this maps to the folder for the current user logged on to Windows, not the process running the web site, or the authenticated web site user.  So i just skip up 2 parent directories from that, and use the current Principal.WindowsIdentity to find the actual process running ASP.NET, and then deduce the correct folder, which by default will have write permissions for Asp.Net.

Here is the code:
string Username = Path.GetFileName(System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name).Replace(" ", "");
string UserAppFolder = String.Format(@"{0}\{1}\Application Data", Directory.GetParent(Directory.GetParent(Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData)).FullName).FullName, Username);

By the way, the use of Path.GetFileName is entirely intentional, it solves the case where the current user is "NT Authority\Network Service" by yielding "Network Service", which is what we are interested in.  

This will hopefully come in handy for my 'zero configuration' idea for the application.  Next time you need a write folder, it may be a good idea to use this instead of making users specify write permissions for a custom folder. 
Comments [2] | | # 
# Friday, February 17, 2006
FtpWebRequest with ProgressBar [C# Ftp]
Friday, February 17, 2006 6:09:05 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00) ( .Net General | .Net Windows Forms )
Screenshot of upload operationhi,
i was delighted to see .Net 2.0 has an excellent class for working with FTP.  looking back i can't believe it wasn't part of 1.1. 

i noticed there was no built-in support for reporting the progress of an FTP operation to a user interface.  I needed this functionality in an app i'm working on so i built a class and i'm posting it here in case anyone is interested.

The class FtpProgress inherits from BackgroundWorker, so you just drag an FtpProgress component onto your form, hook up events for Completed and ProgressChanged, and your laughing.  There is a mini class called FtpSettings which stores all the connect info etc to pass in as a paramter to the RunWorkerAsync() method.

I have a variable called 'ChunkSize' which determines the size of each buffer written to the FtpWebRequest output stream.  It is set to 4k by default, and you can increase this if you want for very fast networks but i don't think it will make much difference.  I think the overhead is negligible.

Download the source code and demo application [30 k].

It only does upload, so if you want download functionality, you can do the mirror-image of the upload code, i.e. instead of writing buffers to the output stream, read it from the input stream, or however that would work :) 

here is all the code you need to start an Upload, and report progress:
private void btnUpload_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
	// create a new FtpSettings class to store all the paramaters for the FtpProgress thread
	FtpSettings f = new FtpSettings();
	f.Host = this.txtHost.Text;
	f.Username = this.txtUsername.Text;
	f.Password = this.txtPassword.Text;
	f.TargetFolder = this.txtDir.Text;
	f.SourceFile = this.txtUploadFile.Text;
	f.Passive = this.chkPassive.Checked;
	f.Port = Int32.Parse(this.txtPort.Text);	
	this.ftpProgress1.RunWorkerAsync(f);
}

private void ftpProgress1_ProgressChanged(object sender, ProgressChangedEventArgs e)
{
	this.toolStripStatusLabel1.Text = e.UserState.ToString();	// the message will be something like: 45 Kb / 102.12 Mb
	this.toolStripProgressBar1.Value = Math.Min(this.toolStripProgressBar1.Maximum, e.ProgressPercentage);		
}
Comments [22] | | # 
# Thursday, February 02, 2006
Using Xml DOM with MetaBase.xml
Thursday, February 02, 2006 1:38:34 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00) ( .Net General | .Net Windows Forms | Asp.Net | Windows Server 2003 )
For some reason i can't get SelectNodes to work with the IIS 6 MetaBase.xml file.  It just doesn't return any matches.  I think the structure may be non-standard or too complex, or else i'm not using it right.  but in any case, I worked around the problem by opening the file with File.OpenText and using Regex to parse out the nodes i'm interested in, namely the IISWebServer nodes.

string MetaBase = "";
using(StreamReader sr = File.OpenText(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["MetaBasePath"].ToString()))
	MetaBase = sr.ReadToEnd();

foreach(Match m in new Regex(@"(?x:)<IIsWebServer[^>]*>.*?</IIsWebServer>", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase).Matches(MetaBase))
{
	XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
	string IisCode = "", ServerBindings = "", ServerComment = "";
	doc.LoadXml(m.Groups[0].Value);
	XmlElement node = doc.DocumentElement;
	// now you can access the node attributes
...

Comments [0] | | # 
CheckBoxList: Select All / None client-side script
Thursday, February 02, 2006 1:25:33 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00) ( Asp.Net )
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
function Select(Select)
{
    for (var n=0; n < document.forms[0].length; n++)
        if (document.forms[0].elements[n].type=='checkbox')
            document.forms[0].elements[n].checked=Select;
    return false;   
}
</script>


Select <a href="#" onclick="javascript:Select(true)">All</a> | <a href="#" onclick="javascript:Select(false)">None</a>
Comments [7] | | #